In the so-called doppelganger murder in Ingolstadt, the police announced new details on Monday. Instead of manslaughter, the police and prosecutors are now investigating a young woman and a young man on suspicion of murder. Both have been in custody since August 2022. They are suspected of planning and carrying out the murder of a woman together. Both the two suspects and the victim were 23 years old at the time of the crime.
The case drew national attention last summer after police initially mistook the wrong woman for the victim. The day after the body was found, it turned out that the dead person, who was discovered in a car parked on the edge of the Danube, is not the owner of the vehicle – but a person who, according to the police, looked “deceptively similar” to the alleged victim. The suspicion quickly arose that the mix-up was not a coincidence, but the result of a deliberate deception. The police have now officially confirmed this suspicion.
The investigators assume “that the suspect wanted to go into hiding because of family problems and fake her death,” according to a statement from Monday morning. When asked, the police did not want to give any details about the family dispute. The act had been prepared for a long time. The two suspects are said to have searched the Internet specifically for the woman who visually resembled the then 23-year-old: long brown hair, dark complexion and a heavily made-up face. According to the police, they were already pursuing the plan to “kill them and place them in such a way that the body would be mistaken for the accused”.
According to the investigation, the suspected murderer is said to have written to potential victims via several social media profiles in order to “persuade them to meet her with false promises”. In this context, the police evaluated several chats with young women. There have been about “a handful” of failed attempts to lure, says police spokesman Andreas Aichele on SZ demand. The actual victim, a beautician from Eppingen in Baden-Württemberg, is said to have been contacted by the suspect on Instagram at the beginning of August and lured into the trap with an offer about cosmetics. However, the spokesman does not specify exactly what this offer looked like.
The victim is said to have been stabbed more than 50 times in a forest
The two women are said to have arranged a meeting for the day of the crime, August 16. “To this end, she traveled with the co-accused in her car to the Heilbronn area to pick up the later victim at home,” the police reconstructed the crime scene. During the return journey, the young woman is said to have been lured out of the vehicle into a wooded area under a pretext, as previously planned. According to the police, she was “killed insidiously with a large number of stabs in the body and for base motives”. According to Aichele, the victim was stabbed more than 50 times. The two suspects then drove on to Ingolstadt, where they left the body in a quiet residential area on the edge of the Danube.
There she was found the same day lying on the back seat of the locked Mercedes, the car of the alleged murderer. The body was discovered late in the evening by the vehicle owner’s parents of all people. When they saw the woman covered in blood in her daughter’s car, they called the ambulance, who then tried to revive the dead woman – without success. In the darkness, the parents believed the victim to be their daughter. The police initially assumed the identity was false. The mix-up was only discovered after an autopsy on the body the next day.
After months of extensive investigations, the public prosecutor’s office and police in Ingolstadt see “the urgent suspicion of jointly committed murder” as justified. The corresponding arrest warrants were issued at the end of last week. The two suspected killers were arrested shortly after the crime. According to the police, they are in different prisons.
Had they already planned their escape after the crime in August? That is “probable, but not yet proven,” says police spokesman Aichele. The question of what relationship the woman and the man had to each other has not yet been finally clarified, they were probably not a couple. The investigations are ongoing. The accused have not commented on the allegations for almost half a year after the crime.